Tomash Pilshchik has commented on the following diary entries

These strings may be taken from an official document or directory as d1g suggests, but that doesn't make them names in the usual sense. They are certainly not names in the sense of the name tag. As best I can make out they are structured descriptions of where the road is.

They all contain lists of inhabited places, villages through which the road passes. A few of these descriptions contain the name of the road. For example, one of them contains the phrase "a segment of the old Smolen Road".

The purpose of these descriptions seems to be to offically define the meaning of the road numbers (which come at the end after a comma) by describing the road segments which bear them.

Thank you for the helpful comments. You were right, Robert, the problem was caused by a dodgy mouse. The right button was bouncing much of the time. If it bounced on mouse down, it would pop up the menu at the start of a drag. If it bounced on mouse up, the the menu would pop up at the end of a drag.

The mouse is a Logitech M100. I took the cover off, fiddled with the switch and lever, and put it back together. For now the bouncing has stopped and so have the rogue popups in JOSM.

I think you guys are being way too hard on Compdude. The guy is just frustrated. If you had read his message more carefully before replying you would have noticed that:

* There are no comments on these bug reports at all. If they are hard to fix, he has no way of knowing that. It would be reasonable for him to believe that they are trivial issues that have fallen through the cracks.

* He has discussed whether or not he can fix them himself and concluded that he can't. How could he? How long do you think it would take even an expert system administrator and programmer to fix a trivial bug in the Mapnik tiles. Let's see, he would have to:

1) Install Postgres, PostGIS, Mapnik, OSM stylesheets, Apache, etc.

2) Download OSM data and load into database

3) Learn how Mapnik works

4) Study the existing stylesheets to figure out how they work

5) Fix the bug

6) Submit the bug fix to the maintainer of the OSM Mapnik stylesheets

It has taken me more than a year to get to step 4 and I am a professional programmer and system administrator. Do we really expect Compdude to do all this to fix a bug which (as far as he knows) somebody else could fix in five minutes?

Finally, I would like to point out that Compdude is using the skills he does have to contribute regularly to this project. I don't should be quick to look for offense in his words or to conclude that he is trying to exploit us.

>Please don't auto-transliterate. That can be done by other pieces of software if >required. You shouldn't be inserting data into openstreetmap which is just a >processed version of other openstreetmap data.

The only other way to do it is to auto-transliterate on the fly. But doing this on a world-wide basis would require a database of transliteration practices (and grandfathered exceptions) for each country in the world. Then any program to render an English-language map would have to deal with the local scripts and properly apply the database to them. I think it is better to let someone with local knowledge perform this tricky task and store the result in OSM.

What you say about the tile server is interesting. I agree that the work of rendering tiles should be offloaded. However, this must be done with care since the tiles are the chief advertisement for the project.

I don't think the Tile Usage Policy should be tightened up until their is a viable alternative. If there were a viable alternative, there would probably be no need to tighten it up since those who deploy maps would probably prefer to be able to adjust the style sheets.

Currently, far too much hardware and effort is required to set up a tile server capable of serving the entire planet to even a small number of users. The entire planet file must be downloaded. A few days are required to create a giant SQL database. Then the data gets out of date and one must do it again. Sure, there is a way to do incremental updates, but last time I looked the documentation described several different methods (some of which seemed to be obsolete) and did not seem to describe the procedure in detail. (I would love to hear that I am wrong about this.)

Of course, even with incremental updates, hundreds of tile servers pulling down gigabytes of data which they will never render does not sound like an efficient system. Wouldn't it be better to set up some public tile data servers like that used for Tiles@home? Then only the tile data servers would need to store the whole planet.

Yesterday I noticed by chance that Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. is labeled as landuse=industrial and man_made=environmental_hazard. This seemed odd to say the least. By following the bread crumbs I found both the EPA data and this diary entry.

The problems with this importation are not comparable to the problems with the TIGER import. TIGER provides information about actual roads but is vague about their location. This importation provides information as seen from the inscrutable point of view of a government bureaucracy.

It is understandable that h4ck3rm1k3 thought this data to be a list of industrial sites where dangerous substances are either used or where they have been dumped. Many of the entries no doubt represent such sites. For example, I see a number of printed-circuit board manufacturers in the list. There are also numerous listings for companies which presumably used large quantities of paint and varnish. However, the list is liberally salted with things which probably should not be tagged landuse=industrial. For example:

It is clear that this is not a list of polluters as the term is generally understood by the public (things we do not want in our back yards). Rather, it appears to be a list of those who have to file papers with the EPA, often for obscure reasons.

It doesn't make sense to leave this data in and correct it in the map. First of all, in its current form it is borderline libelous. (Since we have removed it from its original context of bureaucratic definitions. When a polluter is described in an EPA report as "major" it probably means "over the threshold for filing a report". In ordinary speech it means something like an iron smelter.)

Second, even if this data can be converted into something intelligible to the layman, waiting for editors to find 10000 points and properly tag them is much less efficient than deleting them, fixing the import (possibly by hand-tagging them in a spreadsheet) and reimporting them. And, if we leave them, many of them will probably simply get deleted since they look like an attempt at humour.

The park outline is probably from the import of the MassGIS open spaces layer. Most of this layer goes back to paper maps which were digitized and traced. They are often wrong about the locations of green spaces, often by about 100 meters.

I see there is another green spaces in the middle of Talbot Avenue which is shifted with reference to the road.

>I'd be cautious about using a 'fake' license in some countries; showing something they might consider a forged identification could just get you into deeper trouble.

So, don't call it a license. It should be a club membership card. Many organizations issue them to their members, volunteers and employees. Meter readers, town tax inspectors, exterminators, door-to-door preachers, practically anyone whose work requires him to walk around where the public can see him has one.

Club or volunteer organization membership cards may read along the lines: "This is to certify that [name] is engaged in [description of activity] as a member of [name of organization]. Signed [name and title of officer]."

Of course, you have to form a club and appoint officers before you can issue ID. This should not be hard to do. Arrange to meet a bunch of other OSM mappers in your area in person, chose a president and a secretary, chose a name such as "Open Street Map of Anytown", and have the secretary write up a list of members and issue them ID cards.

Such a card might read:

This is to certify that John Smith is a member of Open Street Map of Anytown which, in cooperation with Openstreetmap.org, creates digital street maps. These maps are available free-of-charge at openstreetmap.org.

[Signed]
John Doe (Secretary)

Such identification is not likely to be accepted of proof of your name, but it can serve to convince a police officer that the activity you are describing is not something you dreamed up on the spot.